


My Soft Place to Land

by Who_Needs_Reality



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Baby Fic, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff without Plot, Soldier Homecoming, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, soldier!bellamy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 11:53:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12035346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Who_Needs_Reality/pseuds/Who_Needs_Reality
Summary: Bellamy's happy to be back. He's even happier to see who's waiting for him.{Or, soldier!Bellamy comes back home after being deployed and meets someone special}





	My Soft Place to Land

**Author's Note:**

> Literally no one asked for this and it serves no purpose beyond tooth-rotting fluff and lavishing Bellamy in love and affection but I do what I want so here you go.

From the outside, the house looks quiet, and it makes Bellamy stop. In a minute, he'll ring the doorbell, do everything that goes with that. But for now, he just needs a moment to appreciate that this is it. When he walks in this door… this time it's forever (not literally forever, obviously, he assumes he'll have to get groceries and stuff, but the sentiment is what counts). The past few years have been difficult--army life isn't what he'd have chosen for himself, but it's the only option he had if he wanted to put himself through college. Even so, the deployments, the days spent making friends who might be dead by their next mission, the long hours spent coming to terms with the fact that all he was getting good at was killing… it wasn't what he'd have chosen.

The jangling of the wind chime hung above the doorframe snaps him out of his reverie and makes his lips tug in a smile. There are the other parts of his life too, the parts he wouldn't even have known to choose. But they're there now, and that's why he's done all of this, isn't it? That's why he's spent nights in tents with the distant sounds of carnage his only lullaby, that's why he's let himself hold her letters instead of her hand, that’s why he’s forced himself to push through and survive when it’s seemed easier just to close his eyes and give up.

He rings the doorbell.

Bellamy wouldn't have guessed, when he got into a shouting match in his Sophomore art history class, that the furious blonde opposite him would be the one whose face he held closest to his heart on overseas deployments, whose voice he'd let himself remember to chase away the nightmares when they kept him awake. He wouldn't have guessed it back then, no, but honestly? That just goes to show what he knows. He's always been used to life throwing him curveballs, horrible ones, ones that tear away people he loves and the parts of himself that are soft and tender. But her? She was a left turn he never saw coming, but one he never regretted following wherever she may lead him.

He can make out muffled sounds coming from inside the house, the padding of someone moving lithely down stairs, cabinets being shut and a phone ringing. He adjusts his duffel bag on his shoulder, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

“Oh, sure!” she’s shouting, her voice getting louder as she gets closer, “ _now_ you decide to show up early. But when I beg you to help me because the smoke alarm’s going haywire, you have _work commitments that can’t be rescheduled_. Seriously, Raven, what the hell--”

Clarke freezes dead when she throws the door open, eyes blown huge.

“Did I forget to mention?” he wonders aloud with a nonchalance that his rapidly fluttering pulse can confirm is fake, “we got off a few weeks early.” He lets himself look at her, then really _look_ at her. She’s cut her hair short, so it curls in at the edges, and she’s slimmer than the last time he saw her, though that much was to be expected.

“Oh my god,” she whispers, and then “ _oh my god_!” A choked sound somewhere between a sob and a laugh tears itself from her throat, and then she flings herself at him, filling his vision with a blur of blonde hair and pale skin. “You _dick_ ,” she’s saying, “you couldn’t have told me?”

He laughs roughly, pulling her closer to him, laughing again when she hitches herself up so her legs wrap around his waist. He’s _holding_ her, and it almost doesn’t feel real--the warmth of her body against his, the beating of her heart pressed against his own.

“Hi,” he murmurs. “I missed you babe, missed you so much.”

“I missed you too,” she says, and her voice is muffled because she’s buried her face in the crook of his neck and doesn’t seem inclined to move anytime soon. He can feel her words, the heat of her breath against his skin. It’s the kind of sensation that strikes you with the sudden awareness that you’re _alive_. “I was so _worried_ ,” Clarke says, sounding almost petulant.

Bellamy can’t help but snort. “ _You_ were worried? Princess I almost went out of my fucking _mind_.” He sets her down gently, his hands resting on her hips, and he lets his eyes over her face. When he speaks, his voice comes out hoarse. “It kills me that I couldn’t… that I wasn’t there for you--”

“ _Hey_ ,” she grasps his face in her hands gently, forcing him to meet her gaze. “None of that now. You _were_ with me,” she takes his hand in her own, lays it on her chest, right over her heart, “right here.”

Bellamy grins. “Gross. You got sappy while I was gone.”

“Shut up,” she grouses, crinkling her nose at him, “I got it from you anyway.”

“Sure, Princess, blame me.”

“Shut _up_ ,” she repeats, and now it’s her turn to grin, “besides. You love it.”

Something in his chest turns to mush. “I love _you_.”

Clarke rolls her eyes, but there’s a blush crawling up her neck. “Now who’s gross?”

That does it. He lunges forward, throwing her over his shoulder and tickling her sides. She shrieks, flailing desperately and trying to swat at him, yelling at him to stop through breathless laughter.

“Idiot,” she pronounces when he sets her down, but she leans up on the tips of her toes to plant a kiss to his cheek, so he doesn’t think she minds too much. “Now if you’re done,” she bites her lip, smiling and ushering him into the house, pulling the door shut behind him, “there’s someone who’s been waiting to meet you.”

Bellamy swallows, wets his lips. “Yeah,” he says, “yeah okay. I’ve--I’ve been waiting too.”

Clarke squeezes his hand. “Just wait here a minute.”

He wipes the sweat on his palms off on his jacket as she disappears up the stairs. It’s strange--this is a moment he’s imagined a hundred different times in a hundred different ways, but now it’s happening and his brain feels like it’s full of static.

Then Clarke reemerges and his mind goes blank.

“Bellamy,” she says, and her voice is trembling, “this is our baby. This is our daughter.”

“Hi,” he breathes, taking the baby from his wife, “hi baby girl.” It’s almost too much, cradling the warm weight of her in his arms. His heart feels so big he almost can’t stand it. Almost. His breath catches in his throat when he sees the wisps of dark, downy hair curled on the top of her head, the bright blue eyes that she’s blinking sleepily at him. Her hands are pinking, furling open and closed like little starfish.

He feels Clarke come up behind him, rest her chin on his shoulder. “Malaya, this is your _dad_.”

 _Malaya_. He knows the name of course, he chose it, asked Clarke to name their girl after his grandmother. He’s whispered it to himself countless times, reminding himself that she’s there, she’s real, waiting for him.

But nothing could have prepared him for this, the real thing. “Hi Malaya,” he breathes, “I love you so much. I’m sorry I haven’t been around much. I missed you a lot while I was away. But I’m here now. And this time I promise I’m never leaving again.”

Clarke’s head snaps towards him so fast he almost hears it. Her intake of breath is sharp. “What?”

He looks to her slowly. “I’m not renewing my contract. I’ll have a couple of things to wrap up locally but… this is it, princess. I’m done. I’m staying.”

Her hands fly to cover her mouth, stifling her sob, and she buries herself in his side. Bellamy moves the arm not holding Malaya to grip his wife’s shoulders; he ducks his head to press a kiss into her head. The baby wriggles a little, and both he and Clarke pull away slightly to look at her.

She looks more alert now, and reaches curiously for his face. He feels strangely nervous under his daughter’s gaze, a sharp pang of sadness going through him as he realises that whilst he loves her so much it feels like he’s holding the entire world in his hands, she doesn’t know him. Clarke laughs--a low sweet laugh that he’s missed like a limb the whole time he’s been deployed--and he sees Malaya is making frustrated whining sounds as she fails to reach his nose properly. He adjusts her and she grasps it. It seems to please her, because she gives him a gummy, toothless smile.

“She’s perfect,” he says marveling at her, “she is so incredible.”

“Well she has great DNA,” Clarke teases. He huffs softly, pressing a kiss to her cheek and then one to Malaya’s. The baby makes a chortling, gurgling sound that he realises, with a warm burst of wonder, is her _laugh_. He’s been wracked by nightmares about the blood on his hands for months, sometimes he thinks he hears gunshots in pin-drop silence, and he had his fists clenched so tightly shut at the sounds when the plane was landing that his knuckles went white. But now he’s here, and Clarke is wrapped around him like she’ll never let go and his baby, their daughter, is _laughing._

He feels Clarke smile against his neck. “Would you look at that,” she murmurs, “she loves her Dad already.” She kisses the underside of his jaw. “I taught her to do that,” and she actually sounds _smug_.

“Well, I love her too,” he retorts, “and I love her ridiculous mother as well.”

He’s here. Bellamy is here. And he’s never leaving again.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this please drop a comment, thanks! <3
> 
> (Also, disclaimer: I know almost nothing about the army or infant development so there you go)


End file.
